A professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over
eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than
three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes
serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as
a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the
mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.

After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer
in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often
drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other
writers.

She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of
subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes
to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her
on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly,
searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder
for stories.

In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary
knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association
presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International
Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman
to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life
Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.

A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from
alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a
professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San
Francisco.

She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an
experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.

Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the
irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy
writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.